Updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday ... and maybe other days too.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Magic, masochism and the marvel of speedchess

Every Wednesday on their website The Guardian run a column rounding up all the best sports related video clips of the week. Today's title, "Magic, masochism and the marvel of speedchess" caught my eye.

Now you can, if you wish, use this feature as a great resource to view some of the best historical and contemporary performances in your sport of choice. For example, this week's column includes links to clips of Greendidge & Haynes: the best opening partnership in test cricket history as well as Robin Smith getting worked over by the West Indies pace attack circa 1990.

Of course I much prefer clips like the one they have linked to showing Gavaskar throwing a hissy fit when given out LBW against Australia more than a quarter of a century ago.

I've never seen this column feature chess before. Today the video embeded below gets a link under the heading of "Not Really Sport But Worth A Look Anyway". You may be interested to know the other link in this category was to rabbit show jumping

Leaving aside the question of whether chess is a sport (we covered that six months ago, and then again a few days later), I wonder why this extremely unexceptional game was worthy of special attention. I suspect if we listen very carefully to the soundtrack we'll hear the noise of a journalist scraping the barrel to pad out an unfinished column.